James Gurney

This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

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All images and text are copyright 2015 James Gurney and/or their respective owners. Dinotopia is a registered trademark of James Gurney. For use of text or images in traditional print media or for any commercial licensing rights, please email me for permission.

However, you can quote images or text without asking permission on your educational or non-commercial blog, website, or Facebook page as long as you give me credit and provide a link back. Students and teachers can also quote images or text for their non-commercial school activity. It's also OK to do an artistic copy of my paintings as a study exercise without asking permission.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

In 1983, soon after I had begun as a published illustrator, National Geographic magazine took a chance and hired me to paint a picture of the explorer Alexander von Humboldt on the Orinoco River.

The assignment was followed by many others, including reconstructions of the legendary voyages of Jason and Ulysses, the kingdom of Kush in Nubia, and the civilization of the Etruscans in Italy.

West Bank, 1987
During those years, National Geographic occasionally sent its artists to meet with the archaeologists on location. A research trip in the summer of 1987 brought me to Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem, which gave me a visceral sense of the weight of time and tradition.

My first glimpse of an actual lost city came at the end of that trip, when I arrived at Petra, the capital of an ancient Arab kingdom hidden in a red sandstone canyon in southern Jordan.

I climbed up to the top of a cliff and sketched the dwellings carved from solid rock. Petra was regarded by Europeans as a myth until 1812, when a Swiss traveler named Johann Ludwig Burckhardt disguised himself as a Bedouin and discovered its secret location.

As I got to know the research archaeologists, they told me of their dreams of making a discovery as significant as Machu Picchu or Ninevah. It occurred to me that I could paint a reconstruction of an imaginary metropolis, building on the tradition of the classic utopias, such as Atlantis and El Dorado.

In between illustration commissions, I sketched ideas for a city built into the heart of a waterfall. I combined two things that didn’t seem to fit together: Niagara Falls and Venice.

I painted Waterfall City in 1988 in my basement beneath a banging steam pipe, while I played phonograph albums of waterfall sound effects. I had only a vague idea of where I would go with the ideas I was stirring up.